Over half of England’s secondary schools are now academies. While their impact on achievement has been debated, the social and cultural outcomes prompted by this neoliberal educational model has received less scrutiny. This book draws on original research based at Dreamfields Academy, a celebrated flagship secondary school in a large English city, to show how the accelerated marketization and centralization of education is reproducing raced, classed and gendered inequalities. The book also examines the complex stories underlying Dreamfields’ glossy veneer of success and shows how students, teachers and parents navigate the everyday demands of Dreamfields’ results-driven conveyor belt. Hopes and dreams are effectively harnessed and mobilized to enact insidious forms of social control, as education develops new sites and discourses of surveillance.
Table of Content
1 Building new narratives: academies, aspiration and the education market
2 Research frameworks: historical representations and formations of race and class meet neoliberal governance
3 Disciplining Dreamfields Academy: a ‘well-oiled machine’ to combat urban chaos
4 Cohering contradictions and manufacturing belief in Dreamfields’ ‘good empire’
5 ‘Urban children’ meet the ‘buffer zone’: mapping the inequitable foundations of Dreamfields’ conveyor belt
6 Students navigating and negotiating the conveyor belt: aspiration, loss, endurance and fantasy
7 Urban chaos and the imagined other: remaking middle-class hegemony
8 Remaking inequalities in the neoliberal institution
Index
About the author
Alexander Smith is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Huddersfield
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